Linux

Dell is partnering with Red Hat to jointly engineer the open-source OpenStack Cloud Platform for enterprise deployments and will offer it to customers on its hardware, a move that differentiates Dell from such rivals as Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the increasingly competitive cloud computing space. At the same time, CEO Michael Dell, in his keynote here Dec. 12 at the Dell World 2013 show, also announced partnerships with public cloud providers Google, Microsoft’s Azure and CenturyLink. Dell also signed a four-year agreement with Accenture to jointly develop and sell enterprise technology solutions, including offerings around cloud computing. Dell and Red Hat have collaborated on Linux for more than a dozen years. In their latest partnership, Dell and Red Hat will co-develop cloud offerings that will run Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHELOP), which is part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5, which was released last month. In addition, Dell will offer a range of services for the solutions, from configuration to support for organizations using RHELOP—and not only Dell customers, but those of IBM, HP and others.

RootCheck is an Open Source software that scans all the system looking for possible problems (RootKit Detection), system auditing and policy monitoring parts of OSSEC. The result of the scan can be sent to an e-mail and you can choose between the html or text format. RootCheck is an extremely useful open source software for servers since it scans the server and finds any problems on it. It is a very simple software. Just download, unpack, compile and execute it. It will scan the whole system and print if it founds or not anything. Installation of RootCheck 1. # wget http://www.ossec.net/rootcheck/files/rootcheck-2.0.tar.gz 2. # tar -zxvf rootcheck-2.0.tar.gz 3. # cd rootcheck-2.0 4. # make 5. # ./ossec-rootcheck If you would like to force a scan again type this command ./rootcheck.pl To download directly from the site http://www.ossec.net/rootcheck/files/rootcheck-2.0.tar.gz

IBM announced Tuesday morning at LinuxCon that they will be investing 1Billion dollars into linux development. Linux is becoming very popular in data centers and IBM wants to capitalize on that by making more of that growth happen on their hardware. IBM plans to spend the money pledged over four or five years on Linux and related open-source technologies for use on its Power line of server systems, which is based on the internally developed chip technology of the same name. Linux has become the mainstay operating system for many servers particularly those used in Datacenters by big Web companies like Google and Facebook. Most of those machines are x86 servers, which take their name from the underlying chip design sold by Intel and AMD. IBM, though it sells such machines, also adapted Linux for use on its mainframes and its Power servers. Power servers tend to be good at heavy-duty computing jobs, such as running large databases. IBM has enjoyed much growth in there Linux sales since there original pledge in 2000. Linux helped popularize the open-source model, based on letting users and others view and modify the underlying instructions used to create a program. The software available for free, which is quite a draw for companies that buy servers by the thousands.

A study conducted by Coverity has found open-source Python code to contain a lower defect density than any other language. The 2012 Scan Report found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects that leverage the Coverity Scan service, as compared to the accepted industry standard defect density for good quality software of 1.0. Python’s defect density of .005 significantly surpasses this standard, and introduces a new level of quality for open source software. Python software has been in use for more than 20 years, enabling secure and reliable programs for industry, service sector and research and science applications. Industry-leading organizations including CERN, Google, Mozilla and YouTube, among many others, incorporate the popular programming language into their applications. Coverity’s code-scanning system for open-source projects, including Python, has been in place since 2006, when the effort was first funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The original DHS funding grant was only for a three-year term, and since its expiration, Coverity has been funding the open-source code scanning on its own. The open-source Python programming language has continued to steadily improve its code quality in recent years and now surpasses that of its open-source and proprietary peers. I myself love the Python language it’s my language of choice.

PayPal’s IT team has taken control of its technology release cycle by shifting key components of its IT infrastructure onto OpenStack. OpenStack is an IT infrastructure framework made up of several components contributed under an open source license by multiple technology providers. OpenStack helps support a ’15 minute rule’ PayPal has set for its developers in an effort to stay ahead of the game. For PayPal, the decision to use components of OpenStack was based around speed to market. It allows the payments provider to untether its release cycle from those of vendor partners. ‘PayPal has not historically been known for its fast reactions,’ PayPal senior engineer Scott Carlson conceded to attendees at the VMworld conference in San Francisco this week. ‘It has taken us six to nine months sometimes to react to our competitors.’ Carlson said PayPal was continually challenged by nimble payments start-ups, and has responded with a series of measures to make its own processed more agile and innovative, including the adoption of open source cloud platform OpenStack.

Conky is highly configurable and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, network interfaces, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes, Linux updates, many popular music players, and much more. Conky has gained a strong following among many Linux and BSD enthusiasts. Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkits to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window. This allows it to consume relatively fewer system resources when configured similarly. Not only does Conky have many built-in objects, it can also display just about any piece of information by using scripts and other external programs. Conky features built-in support for several unrelated sources of information, but its biggest strength lies in its extensibility through scripting. Conky can be extened threw python scripting many Conky versions are used in WordPress blogs for written visualization tools. Conky is supported natively on Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Arch, Foresight, and can be compiled from source. The name Conky comes from a character in the Canadian TV show titled “Trailer Park Boys”. Conky has been licensed under the GPL 3.0. The download is hosted on SourceForge and the project can be joined on GitHub.

Unix, the core server operating system in enterprise networks for decades, now finds itself in a slow, inexorable decline. IDC predicts that Unix server revenue will slide from $10.2 billion in 2012 to $8.7 billion in 2017, and Gartner sees Unix market share slipping from 16% in 2012 to 9% in 2017. The decline is due to competition from Linux and Microsoft which can handle more efficient hardware with more powerful processor cores with less expensive and requires less maintenance. Unix has taken hits from hardware and software venders with lack of support and application development slowdowns. Within the Unix ecosystem, IBM has taken advantage of the turmoil at HP, as well as the uncertainty that resulted from Oracle’s purchase of Sun. Despite Oracles sun purchase Oracle has continued to see declining hardware revenues. Part of this decline is due to recent ecosystem changes in line with IT modernization, migration, or consolidation strategies and the huge push for mobile computing and cloud based infrastructure systems. This is an area where Unix is not a strong competitor Unix systems have always be known for stability in mission-critical environments. While Unix is still held in high regard for stability enterprises are seek to divest their reliance on the platform due compatibly with other cloud based application. Although the Unix market is declining, there is still considerable competition and churn in the segment. HP-UX has lost considerable market share to IBM, which, as far as I can see, has posted net gain in revenues and market share. IBM 56% market share, based on 2012 worldwide Unix server revenue. Oracle is a distant second at 19.2%, followed by HP at 18.6%. While Unix revenues are in a long, slow descent, nobody is predicting that Unix will go away completely Unix still has its strength...

Pipelight is a new open-source project for getting Microsoft Silverlight applications to run within web-browsers on Linux, including the widely sought after Netflix Player on Linux. The Pipelight project for Silverlight in Linux browsers works with any browser supporting the Netscape Plugin API (e.g. Firefox) and consists of a Linux library loaded by the web-browser and also a Windows program started in Wine. The fake Windows program simulates a browser and loads the Silverlight DLL libraries. The Pipelight work by the developers included implementing the necessary Digital Rights Management support for Netflix within Wine. Pipelight consists out of two parts: A Linux library which is loaded into the browser and a Windows program started in Wine. The Windows program, called pluginloader.exe, simply simulates a browser and loads the Silverlight DLLs. When you open a page with a Silverlight application the library will send all commands from the browser through a pipe to the Windows process and act like a bridge between your browser and Silverlight. The used pipes do not have any big impact on the speed of the rendered video since all the video and audio data is not send through the pipe. Only the initialization parameters and (sometimes) the network traffic is send through them.

1. Run alienvault-setup and Jail Break OSSIM Server to allow you command line access 2. First IP your second interface card that will not be used for management eth# # ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.5 netmask 255.255.255.0 up # ifconfig eth0 3. Edit your /etc/ossim/ossim_setup.conf. Under [sensor], add your new interface to the interfaces interfaces=eth0, eth1 4. Add ip of the second network card to ip under sensor and framework [sensor] detectors=ossec-single-line, prads, pam_unix, suricata, ssh, sudo ids_rules_flow_control=yes interfaces=eth0, eth1 ip=192.168.1.5 monitors=nmap-monitor, ntop-monitor, ossim-monitor mservers=no name=alienvault netflow=yes netflow_remote_collector_port=555 networks=192.168.0.0/16,172.16.0.0/12,10.0.0.0/8 tzone=US/Eastern [framework] framework_https_cert=default framework_https_key=default framework_ip=192.168.1.2 5. run ossim-update so OSSIM will reconfigure 6. Now if you go to the management address and login you should see traffic from second network card.